


Isla de Rotten Fish

by ckret2



Series: No Kings Only Monsters (KOTM continuity / related oneshots) [24]
Category: Godzilla (2014), Godzilla - All Media Types, Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, i see your "they worship titans as gods!" and raise you a "they treat titans like neighbors"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 05:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21350992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: They say that the only way the terrified islanders could appease the awful demon was by sacrificing their own people to the volcano in exchange for the demon’s mercy.However, “they” were writing in Spanish, cited no sources, and claimed that the demon was probably local superstition, so you’re pretty sure “they” were the same bunch of rosary-clutching conquistadors who had claimed Moctezuma thought Cortés was a god.In other words: they were full of bullshit.Yesterday you sat outside with a Coke and spent half an hour watching Rodan bounce a rock on his beak like a tiny soccer ball.
Series: No Kings Only Monsters (KOTM continuity / related oneshots) [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1483448
Comments: 10
Kudos: 112





	Isla de Rotten Fish

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted Sept 2. Written to the prompt "If you’re taking prompts still, could I request a Rodan x Reader or a Godzilla x Rodan one shot? 8D Also bless your writing I love it sm!!" I actually wasn't taking prompts but I needed an excuse to write something Rodan-centric and also productively vent my annoyance that no one seemed capable of doing anything interesting with the residents of Isla de Mara.

They say the volcano on Isla de Mara is _el nido del demonio_—the Nest of the Demon.

They say that the volcano is a portal to hell, and that periodically a devil will crawl out of it to terrorize the island and nearby coastline.

They say that the only way the terrified islanders could appease the awful demon was by sacrificing their own people to the volcano in exchange for the demon’s mercy.

However, “they” were writing in Spanish, cited no sources, and claimed that the demon was probably local superstition, so you’re pretty sure “they” were the same bunch of rosary-clutching conquistadors who had claimed Moctezuma thought Cortés was a god.

In other words: they were full of bullshit.

Yesterday you sat outside with a Coke and spent half an hour watching Rodan bounce a rock on his beak like a tiny soccer ball.

If Rodan were a threat to the local humans, they wouldn’t have sacrificed each other to him; they would have _moved away._ But Huastecos lived two flaps away from his nest for hundreds of years, even when he was awake. In your opinion, as long as no one’s firing missiles at him, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.

You’ve lived on Isla de Mara your whole life, just as your Huasteco ancestors have been doing for centuries. The volcano that’s now covered in freshly-spilled volcanic rock is part of the background set for your life.

One of your earliest memories is of hiking up the Nest on your father’s shoulders. You clutched your hands in his hair when he turned around and you could see how far below the town was. At seventeen, you and a couple of friends from school snuck up on a mutual dare, trying to get as close as you could to the danger lurking over the crater—not the legendary demon, but the “geothermal power plant” with armed security guards.

You’ve hiked all over the volcano, biked down every street, swam on every beach, and walked through the forest. You’ve got an apartment that looks north toward the volcano. You’ve made hundreds of pizzas in a restaurant that’s open to the sky and has beautiful murals painted on the naked concrete walls. This is _your_ island. You’re not leaving it because the damn U.S. Army goaded a titan into attacking it, and you’re not leaving it because the damn U.S. Army killed the nearby ocean. You’re certainly not leaving it because the volcano happens to be occupied.

You stayed on a nearby island while Isla de Mara was still under quarantine—because of the eruption, because of the bombing, because of the monster returning to roost—but still close enough that sometimes Rodan’s shadow fell on you as he circled his island. The second a crew came through looking for people to help clean up the island, you volunteered. It mean going home a little bit sooner.

When you got there, you found you weren’t the first one back. At least a couple dozen people had ignored the quarantine and boated home. Many of them you knew. You were happy to see them all. And more return by the day—tired, bitter, determined—driven by love and spite to sweep the volcanic ash out of the streets, rebuild what’s burned down, uncover what’s been buried, mourn the dead properly, and continue their lives exactly where they always have.

So now, here you are.

Scooping up dead fish.

###

The largest industry on Isla de Mara is—was—fishing. Plenty of people have boats; many of them came back. But the waves of dead fish are endless. You’re not a fisher, but you can work a motor boat, so you go out with the morose fishers with large nets, help them scoop up wave after wave of fish, and dump them on the beach.

You wear masks as you work—cheap dust masks, respirators provided by the Monarch agents who came to study Rodan but decided to pitch in, one old lady even has a gas mask—and still you smell the endless rotting fish. The smell clings to your skin. When you don’t smell like rotting fish, you smell like the volcano. One of the fishers’ daughters shares something about doctors during the Great Plague in Europe filling their masks with herbs and flowers to protect them from the stench, and you all start spraying perfume on the inside of your masks. It helps, but not entirely.

At least the fish are still floating. It makes them a lot easier to scoop up.

You’re all piling the fish inside several shipping containers. They’re at the northernmost tip of the island, which takes a lot longer to reach but keeps the fish away from town. The plan is for the cleanup crew to fill the shipping containers and then someone—you’re not sure who, there are dozens of titan relief organizations now—will take them away for disposal and leave more behind. But the shipping containers are spilling over, still nobody has come, and the birds are attacking the rotting fish.

Today, the fish attract an even bigger bird.

###

You and a couple other workers are on the beach to dump your latest load of fish when a massive shadow swoops overhead. You pause, glancing up, but quickly get back to work; you’re all getting used to Rodan circling overhead as he comes and goes from his volcano.

But then he passes overhead again. And again.

And then the wind kicks up.

You freeze. And then all three of you bolt for the shelter of the trees. If he’s landing, you’ll need something to cling to. You don’t want to get blown down the beach.

You’ve wrapped yourselves around the nearest trunks when he thuds down on the beach. The impact knocks you to the ground.

At least the wind is dying down. You roll over, rub your cheek where the bark scratched it, and look up.

Rodan is peering down at your containers of fish, beak clamped together, eyes narrowed, and wearing what you’re pretty sure is a grimace of disgust. “What’s he doing?” you whisper.

“Dunno,” one of the other fishers says. He still has his arms around his tree, but he’s slid down the trunk and it pushed his shirt up. “Maybe he’s hungry?”

Rodan sticks out his tongue at the fish and blows the world’s loudest raspberry. It’s surprisingly high-pitched.

“Not for _that_,” mutters the second fisher.

You don’t blame him.

“Why don’t you ask him what he wants?” asks the second fisher. “He’s just a big dinosaur, right?”

You shoot him a look. He’s grinning. You went to school with him—you’ve probably known him since you were five. You’re not close friends, but he knew you during your dinosaur phase.

All ten years of it.

“He’s not,” you snap. And then, because you can’t help yourself, you add, “Pterosaurs technically aren’t dinosaurs.” He suppresses a wheezing laugh.

(You’ve got to admit, though—once the initial terror and outrage wore off, you were gleeful to discover that an actual pteranodon was living in your backyard. A giant, lava-filled pteranodon. Somewhere deep inside, your dinosaur-loving inner child is screaming in glee. If you’ve got to have a titan on your island, then dammit, at least you’ve got the best one.)

Rodan inspects the containers a few moments longer with increasing displeasure, then takes off. You all cling to your chosen trees again, waiting for him to leave.

He doesn’t leave, though. He hovers in spot just over the containers. Some of the fish blow off and land in the sand. Then, facing the ocean, he grabs a container delicately between two claw tips—like gingerly picking up a dead cockroach a napkin—and lifts it up.

He’s facing the ocean.

Oh no. He’s not about to dump all those fish back in.

Without thinking, you get to your feet and tear down the beach, waving at him and screaming at the top of your lungs. If the others say anything, you can’t hear it over Rodan’s wind. It’s like trying to run directly toward a hurricane. But despite feeling several times like you’re about to be lifted off your feet, you keep running and keep yelling.

He spots you.

(That’s only a slight surprise. You’re wearing a neon pink-green-yellow jacket, designed by the same artist who painted the restaurant where you work. For something so small, you stick out.)

He lands.

The wind stops and your sprinting speed abruptly increases, now that he’s not blowing you back. Your momentum hurtles you toward and you stumble to a stop so close to Rodan, you can feel the heat he’s radiating. It feels like opening the door to a pizza oven. You backpedal, both to get away from the heat and so that you don’t have to look straight up at his face.

He cocks his head at you.

You point at the container, and then at the ground. “Put it down!” you shout. “_Down!_” He doesn’t understand you. Can he even _hear_ you?

He looks at the container—still held in his foot—then at you. He doesn’t appear to be impressed. He makes a fake throwing gesture, pantomiming flinging the container out to sea.

In despair, you watch two net loads of fish fly out of the container and back into the water.

“_NO!_” You make a big X with your arms, and then pantomime putting the container down again. “We’re trying to get them _out_ of the water! Out!” How do you make him understand? You run into the surf, pick up one of the fish, gag, and fling it onto dry sand. “You see?!” You pantomime scooping up more with your hands and throwing it onto the beach.

Rodan tilts his head as he studies you, the fish—and then the sea. For a moment, he seems to forget about you as he stares out at the ocean: the still, filthy, dreary ocean. As monstrous as his vast eye is, iris glittering bright gold against a dark sclera, something in it looks human in a way that hurts your heart.

His eyes carry the same look that you’ve seen in every person who’s come back to Isla de Mara: the grief of gazing at the ruin that’s been made of one’s home.

He looks back at you, and you think he understands.

He takes off again. The force of it blows you onto your back. You squeeze your eyes shut and shield your face with your arms until the sand has stopped blowing. When you look up, he’s flying toward his volcano, still carrying the container. 

There’s a puff of smoke from the volcano. You’re still trying to process what you just saw—did he dump your fish into his nest?—before he returns to the beach and drops the shipping container. You hide your head under your arms once more as the impact sprays sand across you. By the time you can look again, he’s halfway back to his volcano with the other two containers carried in his talons.

Where he picked up the first shipping container, the metal is dented inward and the paint is burned and peeled.

You’ve gotten up on your knees and braced yourself when he drops the other two containers, and get to your feet again as soon as he lands. The containers still stink like hell, but they’re usable again. And he dumped three shipping containers of rotting fish into his own nest to help you do that?

Absolutely flabbergasted, you yell up at him, “Thank you?” What else is there to say? Even if he _does_ understand human languages, he’s probably been asleep since before Spanish was spoken on Isla de Mara. How do you say “thank you” in Huasteco? Your mind just went completely blank.

He makes a loud chirp that threatens to pop your eadrums in. You wonder if he actually said something to you, or if he’s just acknowledging that you made a sound at him.

He points his beak toward his volcano, looks down at you reproachfully, sticks out his tongue, and makes a long hissing noise.

“What?” you ask. “Gross?”

He ducks his head and rubs a nostril along the edge of his wing, like he’s trying to scrape out a smell.

“Yeah, gross. Hey!” You wave up at him, and then gesture down toward the beach. He looks at the sand, then back up at you. “No, like _this._” You crouch down, leaning forward to lower your head. He hesitates, then ducks down until his head is level with yours.

God, every time you see him from a new angle, you’re amazed all over again at how mind-bogglingly _huge_ he is. His eyeball is the size of your head. How does something that big survive? While covered with volcanic stone, too? Maybe he’s like a bird, hollow bones to stay light—maybe he’s got bones made out of pumice? Pumice floats in water. Is pumice strong enough to form a titan’s bones? You don’t know.

“Here, this will help with the stink.” From a large pocket in your cargo pants, you take out the bottle of cheap flowery perfume you and the others have been using to fill your masks, and spray it into his nostril.

It immediately ignites. You both squawk in alarm and stumble back from each other. You end up, _yet again_, falling over in the sand.

He lets out a piercing shriek, and you’re sure he’s going to kill you for your error. It takes you a moment to register that you _aren’t_ dead, and that he’s still shrieking in short staccato bursts—he’s laughing.

You stare up at him in amazement. He gives you one last look, eye squinted in amusement—then takes off for the last time and heads out toward sea.

When you return to the other two fishers, their jaws are both dropped. You spent the whole walk over to them trying to think of something cool to say. All you managed to come up with is, “Bet you wish _you’d_ studied dinosaurs, huh?”

###

All three of you give up on work for that day—no way in hell you’re scooping up more fish after that—and no one believes you when they get back to the trailer and you explain to them why you’re “slacking off.” To make up for taking a half day off, you’re out on the sea again at the crack of dawn.

And there, out on the ocean with you, skimming close to the surface and dragging along a massive discarded Monarch tent like a net, is Rodan. He’s scooping dead fish out of the water and dumping them on the beach.

In a few days, you see him skim the surface of the lava out of his nest, work it into a ball with his clawed fingertips as it cools, and go down to a beach to crumble it up. Dark volcanic dust and the ashes of cremated fish rain down on the beaches.

The sand gets darker over the coming weeks—but slowly, the sea gets cleaner.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187435469062/isla-de-rotten-fish). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!


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